I tried making a single tron-ish texture out of the orange and pink matrices together and it looked amusing but not worth keeping. I decided the best avenue would be to try and rationalize the environment as a bunch of free floating orange cubes arcing pink electricity and/or laser security grids between them (lasers are secure, I've never seen one broken into).

I extracted and blew up the tile:

Apparently getting their offset right was too much effort.

That got me thinking as to how to use that asymmetry as part of the effect.

Thanks! I'm suspecting that I post some of this stuff too early, because I get excited about all the possibilities (because I know what I'm thinking I'll do with it) while everyone else is just seeing some marshmallowy blobs of red and orange. Oh well, maybe being shown how everything is iterative and starts by looking like crap will help some other new people out.

I am becoming increasingly amused by the idea of a pink spaceship powered by sparkles flying through gritty brown Quake-like textures. I think I'll roll with this style, at least for some of the sprite-derived levels.

I'm guessing you mean gameplay? I haven't been talking about that as much yet because;

None of my current gameplay experiments have made for meaningful screenshots or demos

The viability of the technology I have in mind for the level/enemy generation will directly affect what I can do with gameplay

My available time is coming in short bursts at the moment, making it easier/more fun to work on little graphical features right now

I also don't believe in committing to gameplay mechanics until I can show myself a practical demonstration that they're actually fun. My current broad idea though is this: A survival-oriented projectile hell "shooter" where you yourself are unarmed. You have to use stunt-like movement to evade attacks, and can generate a gravity field of some kind around your ship. The gravity field can suck enemy pieces/projectiles into orbit around you. This creates a shield you can use to ram enemies, protect yourself from shots, or slingshot junk at targets.

I'm currently planning to extend the joke of things being based directly on Action 52 sprites by making the enemies out of voxels, and generating their shapes from sprite rips (I'll have to draw alternate views of most of them). Destroying an enemy will shatter them into their component voxels which can be used as more shield junk.

The voxels will be billboarded particles rather than "Minecraft cubes" so I'm hoping this means I can get away with a huge number of them on screen.

Question for the movement tech demo, are there no other normal movement other than barrel roll and whatever-up-down-roll? Did you try using mouse movement?

I'm not using the mouse since the game jam rules dictated only arrow keys and two buttons. I had wanted for a long time to experiment with a game where the "advanced" movement is the "normal" movement for that matter.

I had wanted for a long time to experiment with a game where the "advanced" movement is the "normal" movement for that matter.

It sound sweet and all, but won't the movement being snapped to one line or another and thus making it harder to dodge bullet? Or maybe your plan is to make it into something like Audiosurf? Not to mock on your choice of doing stuff, but I just kinda curious on how you gonna achieve that.

It sound sweet and all, but won't the movement being snapped to one line or another and thus making it harder to dodge bullet? Or maybe your plan is to make it into something like Audiosurf? Not to mock on your choice of doing stuff, but I just kinda curious on how you gonna achieve that.

It's not mocking at all, I'd rather people critique everything early on.

The enemies will behave differently in each perspective. You're not going to actually have control over the perspective in-game, it will change itself based on the level. Enemies will only shoot bullets at you on the plane the gameplay is currently taking place in, so if you're in side or top view it''ll work like most 2d shooters for example. The gravity shield will make this system make more sense once I have it in there too, but first I need to get some working enemies.

I've added a bunch of 2 dimensional vectors which control the length of your dodge moves on a per-perspective basis. It feels a lot more natural now.

I also played with the render settings a bit and found out that you can in fact control things like ambient lighting and fog through script. This has fantastic implications for the random level generator, as it's going to allow for a tonne of possible visual styles.

Not much to screenshot yet but here's a slightly improved engine light:

Finally got a prototype version of the primary mechanic implemented that I'm happy with. Behold, the G-Force:

Activating the G-Force will suck all nearby projectiles, scrap, and potentially small enemies, into a tight orbit around your ship:

Pressing the activation button again while you have satellites will burst your shield, scattering them:

The mechanic is perspective agnostic and works gracefully in 3 dimensions, even when your movement is confined to a 2-dimensional plane:

What makes this really special is the fact that absolutely none of this behaviour is "canned". The objects orbiting your ship are the result of a natural balance of forces involving no manual setting of positions and no parented transforms.

Aside from contributing to a very natural and satisfyingly physics-y feel, this also means that the satellites will rubber band around your dodges, allowing you to slingshot them at targets as a kind of long-reaching melee weapon:

Just wanted to let everyone watching this thread know that I am still in fact working on this. I've been quiet lately because I've been testing out a new Xtreme Programming methodology known as a "Nervous Breakdown".

When real life lets me get back to this I'll be implementing enemies for you to smack stuff into, and the random level generator.